[FW] Living With Crystals Touch the Earth: A Deeper Look at Grounding Stones

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Living With Crystals Touch the Earth: A Deeper Look at Grounding Stones

When I discovered crystals, I realized that one way to balance my energies was to keep grounding crystals around. Since I quickly fell in love with smoky quartz, hematite, black tourmaline, and tiger's eye, I was set for a lifetime of grounding.

However, as I began to explore the relationship between crystals and the chakras, I discovered grounding stones weren't limited to those associated with the first chakra. This is because the energies of particular chakras often need to be grounded or stabilized.

Calming the Chakras

For example, the sixth chakra (also called the third eye, and located between and slightly above the physical eyes) governs mental processes, including reason and logic, intuition, and psychic awareness. Many people find that having a lively, flexible, and imaginative intellect enhances creativity. Sometimes, though, mental processes become a little too lively, producing scattered, disconnected thoughts, and mental confusion which is often deepened by emotional turmoil.

Under such conditions, it can be very difficult to make the most appropriate decision. The ideal crystal for such a state of mind is sodalite, a grounding dark-blue stone with streaks of black and white. It helps to calm the emotions and the mind, creating a space of mental quiet during which we can view the possibilities of a situation with objectivity and detachment.

Each chakra is associated with at least one crystal that has a grounding eff ect on its energies. I describe here the ones I've found most helpful.

First Chakra: Various Crystals

This chakra is all about grounding, and I've written about the relationship of the crystals associated with it to grounding at http://www.rainbowcrystal.com/crystal/firstchakrastones.html

Second Chakra: Red Jasper

The second chakra relates to passion, creative energy, sexuality, the flow of blood through our bodies, freedom of motion, and feeling. Overall, it is about movement and flow, whether that flow is physical or emotional.

Sometimes flow becomes flood. We may feel overwhelmed by sensation or emotion. As a physical flood sweeps away topsoil and looses the roots of trees, sometimes uprooting them altogether, so an unbalanced second chakra may make us feel as if life is moving too fast and out of control.

One antidote for this feeling is red jasper. Unlike high-energy crystals (strong examples being Herkimer diamonds and rutilated quartz), this crystal's energy is slow moving and grounding. It is, in some Native cultures, thought to be the symbolic blood of the earth. As such, it helps us to connect with earth's deep, stabilizing energies.

Generally it's considered to be an emotionally calming stone. This makes it excellent for those who either feel unbalanced by stronger crystalline energies or who like change to be a gradual process.

Third Chakra: Tiger's Eye

This chakra relates to self-esteem, the expression of personal power, and the ability to realize one's dreams. Sometimes we know what we want, have access to the energy needed to create it, but feel at a loss in terms of the steps necessary for accomplishment. When this occurs, it is because we are disconnected from our inner knowing.

Tiger's eye (which, because it is both gold and brown, relates to the first and third chakras) helps us to reground us in our deepest intuition. It enables to activate the qualities of patience and timing. It also assists us in having more confidence in our ability to realize our dreams by connecting us to the inner resources we can use for accomplishment.

Solar Plexus: Chrysoprase

(Note: while the solar plexus is generally considered to be part of the third chakra, it has some distinctive qualities.)

When I lead a meditation, I often have students visualizing roots extending deep into the earth. The idea of being anchored to the earth symbolizes rootedness in physical existence.

We also become more deeply rooted in the physical plane when we appreciate its many beauties and pleasures. Chrysoprase, a sea green stone, encourages this kind of receptivity.

As a solar plexus stone, it relates to the release of emotional blockages and to full, deep breathing. When we are storing emotions we don't want to feel in the solar plexus, we block our ability to appreciate—because appreciation is feeling, and we've learned that feeling hurts.

Chrysoprase, by helping us to learn to focus on positive energies, allows us to diminish the power of negative feelings from the past. Thus healing occurs as we learn to appreciative all that is joyful in our lives. This appreciation teaches us to be grateful for our physical existence.

Heart: Rhodonite

When all is well and love flows smoothly, we experience it as passion, joy, ecstasy. Our feet may not be touching the ground, but we don't care, for we are deeply grounded in the experience of loving.

When all is not well, and irritation, anger, annoyance and other emotions block our experience of love, we may forget we ever loved the person who is causing us such displeasure and pain. We are ungrounded. The crystal that can help us reconnect to the source of love is rhodonite.

This deep pink stone with black streaks represents patience. While tiger's eye stands for the kind of patience connected with knowing when and how to take the steps that help to manifest one's dreams, rhodonite is associated with how we relate to others.

It is a patience that allows others to be however they are without judging them. It means not shooting off hostile vibrations to a slow teller or cashier, staying calm when faced with a barrage of questions from a curious child, understanding that your mate loves you even if (s)he forgot to take the garbage out.

I don't say rhodonite accomplishes this on its own, but it definitely helps.

Fifth Chakra: Amazonite

The fifth chakra relates to self-expression. True self-expression involves honesty: communicating how you really feel, what you really want, what you truly believe.

Have you ever been in a situation where someone (or your own long pent-up anger) kept on goading you to say what you felt, and it all poured out in a flood of words that you immediately wished you could stuff back into your mouth?

This is the kind of situation working with amazonite can help you avoid.

Courage of self-expression means expressing yourself before the need to unload your feelings becomes explosive. It means being grounded in self-expression: knowing what you feel and being able to express it in a calm and self-confident way. In the deepest sense, it means being grounded in your inner being or higher self and being able to express your unique, personal truths.

Sixth Chakra: Charoite

I've already described sodalite as a grounding crystal for the sixth chakra. Another is charoite, a purple stone with black and white streaks.

One of the pleasures of being in physical existence is to be in a continual and joyful process of translating nonphysical into physical energy (or ideas into things). If we are finding limitations in doing this, it's often because fear keeps us from being grounded in the use of the laws of physical existence.

Charoite helps us to handle fear. While the purple in this stone helps us to move closer to spirit, the color black grounds the purple ray, and enables us to explore the nature of our fears so that we may release them.

Seventh Chakra: Chrysanthemum Stone

Our journey through life, like our journey through the chakras, is, at its best, an unfolding that returns us to universal source, as represented by the seventh chakra. Sometimes that journey feels more like a roller coaster ride, so bumpy a trip that, bruised and battered, we hit the brakes. Thus, we lose our grounding connection to the source that guides us.

Chrysanthemum stone helps us to have a smoother ride, to experience change as flowing growth. This black stone has delicate white patterns like Asian brush paintings. I think of the black as the grounding force that frames the pure path of the soul's journey.

When we aren't racing through the scenery of our lives, we're able to enjoy the journey and appreciate the blossoming of each moment and its gifts.

This is the gift of chrysanthemum.